Attribution is the work of tying a job back to whatever produced it.
It matters because the alternative is the oldest problem in advertising: you know roughly half of it is working, and you cannot tell which half. Without attribution, the honest answer to "should I spend more on this?" is a guess, and the guess is usually made from whichever number is easiest to see.
Why it is hard
The click and the job are separated by everything that makes a service business a service business. Somebody sees an advertisement on a phone, does nothing, calls two days later from a different number, books an appointment for the following week, and pays a month after that.
By the time money changes hands, four systems hold four pieces of it, and none of them can see the others.
What Omnyra does
When a job appears, Omnyra looks for an advertising click from the same visitor within the hour before it and links the two.
Each link carries a confidence, because certainty here would be a lie:
- High — exactly one candidate click. The connection is as good as this gets.
- Medium — a few candidates, and the closest in time is taken.
- Low — many candidates, so the link is weak and should be read as a hint.
Confidence is shown rather than hidden. A number presented as certain when it is a coin-flip is worse than no number, because it gets acted on.
Calls
Phone calls are the hardest case and the most common one, which is why call tracking exists. A separate tracked number per advertisement is the only reliable way to know which one produced the ring.
Feeding results back
Where it is enabled, completed jobs are reported back to Google Ads. This is not reporting for its own sake: it lets Google's bidding optimise toward customers who actually paid rather than toward people who filled in a form. It is usually the single highest-return change available to a small advertiser.
What it will never do
Attribution cannot see word of mouth, the van in the driveway, or the customer who remembered you from three years ago. Those are frequently the largest sources of work in a service business and they leave no trace.
Read attribution as "of the work I can trace, here is what produced it", never as a complete picture of where customers come from. Businesses that forget the caveat cut the marketing that was quietly working.